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This week Brian and Patricia sit down with curator Tanya Zimbardo during her residency at Krowswork, a center for Video and Visionary Art, in Oakland. Tanya is a San Francisco-based curator. Her research and writing is primarily centered on conceptual art and experimental media in California in the 1970s and 1980s. She is co-curating the group survey Public Works: Artists’ Interventions 1970s – Now at Mills College Art Museum this fall.

As the Assistant Curator of Media Arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, she curated select film and video screenings and co-organized the past two SECA Art Award exhibitions and overview Fifty Years of Bay Area Art: The SECA Awards, among other exhibitions. She has contributed essays to several SFMOMA publications, most recently West Coast Visions(2015, Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul). As a guest contributor to Open Space (2012?14), Zimbardo highlighted various site works, public interventions, and artist-run spaces in the Bay Area, including Receipt of Delivery, her weekly series featuring exhibition mailers.

The Krowswork Residencies feature a diverse range of visionary artists and artwork—from graffiti to poetry and from elaborate sci-fi video installations to Kabalistic painting. These Krowswork Residents present their own work, host conversations and events, and in some cases present the work of others. Each Resident is implicitly or explicitly in conversation with those who come before and after, as well as in dialogue with the total arc of the year.

This week: San Francisco checks in with a great interview.Â Bad at SportsÂ contributors Brian Andrews and Patricia Maloney sat down with artist Takeshi Murata and sound designer Robert Beatty on November 9, 2013, at Ratio 3, in San Francisco, to discuss Murataâ€™s most recent digitally animated video,Â OM Rider(2013).Â OM RiderÂ follows two animated creatures: a wizened old man that Andrews describes as â€œhalf theÂ Curious GeorgeÂ Man in the Yellow Suit, half like the butler fromÂ Rocky Horror Picture Show,â€Â and a hipster wolf, which rides a moped through a barren landscape and performs other aimless tasks. The video begins with the creature playing a synthesizer that gives the video its title.Â Om RiderÂ contains Murataâ€™s characteristic absurd humor and aesthetic, which mixes highly attuned lighting and composition with more retro modeling and minimalist, almost antiseptic spaces.

Takeshi Murata was born in 1974 in Chicago. In 1997, he graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, where he studied film, video, and animation. He currently lives and works in Saugerties, New York. Murata has exhibited at the New Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy; Sikemma Jenkins & Co., New York; Gladstone Gallery, New York; and Salon 94, New York. Murataâ€™s work is featured in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens; and The Smithsonian Museum of American Art.

FYI, AP will post an excerpted text version of this interview on Dec. 3, and the link for that conversation should be:

The best thing about living in San Francisco is that I can step out of my apartment and, without any planned route, find an art exhibition that I had no idea was happening. At the beginning of every month, I like to walk my rent check to my property manager’s office by the Civic Center. The Civic Center is a cultural crown of jewels in this city with a symphony, ballet, opera, library, and museum surrounding City Hall. SF is so cool that the city closes the Civic Center for massive events like a concert by Deadmau5 or the 2013 X Games Dew Tour complete with a skate park and dirt bike course.

City Hall

Louise M. Davis Symphony Hall

War Memorial Opera House

On this particular rent-check-walk, I decided to check out the main branch of the SF Public Library at the Civic Center. If you’ve seen the 1998 movie City of Angels starring Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan, then you’ll understand this: it’s the same library that all the angels in black coats visit to read books and stand around looking creepy! Little did I know that there would not only be one exhibition, but five! Stumbling across these exhibitions in a space like a public library brought me back to undergrad and learning about the idea of curating. It’s an interesting position to be curating a show at a library — a local history and audience are engaged primarily with something else in the space (the books) but are somehow casually distracted, entertained, and educated by the exhibition.

SF Public Library main branch

A part of the exhibition, Three Artists Witness the Occupy Movement: A Plein Air Story.

The first exhibition I accidentally saw was called Three Artists Witness the Occupy Movement: A Plein Air Story. If it weren’t for the table jutting out in the middle of the walkway, I would have kept on going about my tour of the library, but I paused to see what the enclosed case had to offer. It was lovely paintings by three different Oakland artists who documented the Occupy Oakland and Occupy San Francisco events. The placard said “Exhibition continues in cafe wall display case, lower level,” so I decided to see what else was in this show.

The other part of the exhibition, Three Artists Witness the Occupy Movement: A Plein Air Story.

Jessica Jirsa, Closing of the Ports, December 12th, 2011. Oil on Canvas.

The painting show was a lot of fun. It’s unclear who curated the show based on the text provided, but a little googling on the Internet leads me to believe that the show was originally presented as Occupy: The Plein Air Story and curated by EricMurphy at Oakland’s Joyce Gordon Gallery last November. This exhibition cleverly puts three different artists side-by-side for a comparison of the same subject depicted in varying styles. John Paul Marcelo’s The Port Shutdown is an eerie march of shadowy dark figures, Anthony Holdsworth’s Occupy the Port of Oakland (2011) is a bright pastel palette of folks walking towards the sunlight, and Jessica Jirsa’s Closing of the Ports (2011) is a colorful cartoon-like gathering of characters.

A Little Piece of Mexico: The Postcards of Guillermo Kahlo and His Contemporaries

After looking at the painting show, I turned around to discover the Mr. and Mrs. George F. Jewett, Jr. Exhibit Gallery and an exhibit titled A Little Piece of Mexico: The Postcards of Guillermo Kahlo and His Contemporaries. In a place like a library, the contributing parties to making the show possible are a paragraph in itself. Here’s who is billed as presenting the show: The San Francisco Public Library, the Consulate General of Mexico in San Francisco, the Department of Latina/Latino Studies in the College of Ethnic Studies and the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs of San Francisco State University, and City Lights Foundation. Wow!

The exhibition makes a fantastic case that the cultural identity of Mexico was shaped by the popularity of the photo postcard at the turn of the 20th century. With images from international photographers like Guillermo Kahlo, Abel Briquet, F. Leon, and CB Waite, the exhibition honors the iconic images that undoubtedly shaped the current contemporary branding of Mexico’s visual identity. The significance of this show to the local Mexican and Mexican-American population is palpable, while also revealing the country’s heavy influence on San Francisco’s own architecture and landscape design.

As I walked upstairs to check out a show about tennis, I noticed another show with fabulous architectural renderings. An exhibition titled UNBUILT: San Francisco spans five venues throughout the city and presents proposals for various buildings and urban spaces within the city that were never realized. My dad is an architect, so genetically so am I, and so this show was really interesting to me. Architects also have the best handwriting in the world, so there’s something about architecture and text that is always aesthetically amazing. As a resident and avid walker of SF for almost five years, I genuinely appreciated seeing these renderings and sketches for spaces that I’ve come to call home — it’s like walking into an artist’s studio or flipping through your old sketch book and seeing thoughts and ideas for past work that just never made it off the page.

Finally, and coincidentally enough for me as a blogger for a blog called Bad at Sports, there were two exhibitions highlighting sports — They Were First: African Americans in Sports and Breaking the Barriers: The ATA and Black Tennis Pioneers. Both exhibitions provide a more historical context (rather than visual) of the obstacles and triumphs of a marginalized group of athletes. Simple timelines line the walls of the library with photos and text reminiscent of a history museum show or even the waiting lobby to the “Soarin’ Over California” ride at Disneyland.

Adena Cartsonis, age 9, 2nd place winner for 7-11 category.

The best part of this entire SF Public Library multi-exhibition day was seeing artwork from the winners of an art contest for kids coinciding with Breaking the Barriers. Northern California kids aged 7 to 18 were asked to portray how they have broken barriers. As cynical as I’ve become now that I’m 30, there will always be a special place in my life in memory of the art opportunities I got when I was a kid. Growing up, my suburban New Jersey town offered plenty of art opportunities for kids that I completely devoured: art classes at school, annual art exhibitions at the mall, and contests for different purposes like a banner at an elementary school or the yearbook cover or the town’s New Year’s Eve celebration logo. How many high school students enroll in AP Art or go through the lengthy submission process for a college art application? It’s awesome that the library exhibition included this artistic component for the local kids, and its something I believe will be a special introduction for every participant, especially the winners. Watch out Hugo Boss Prize 2035!

Last week, I had a fascinating conversation with Lacey Haslam of Oakland-based BLOCK Gallery and artist Kari Marboe regarding their newest project titled Latham Memorial Fountain Unveiled. Six months ago, they connected over email and by November, BLOCK will be presenting Kari’s site-specific public artwork in Oakland’s downtown area — specifically on the site known as Latham Square.

It wasn’t until half way through our conversation that I realized that we were sitting in Latham Square, just a few feet away from the site-specific building windows that would house Kari’s artwork. Kari shared fascinating stories and trivia tidbits about the small section of the city known as Latham Square, which was named after the late-19th century pioneer family of James and Henrietta, and their children Milton and Edith. The family had fueled money and programming into Oakland, including education for children on animal rights. One hundred years ago, Milton and Edith created a memorial fountain to their parents that was for “both man and beast”. The incredibly historical Latham Fountain now sits in Latham Square – sans running water – as a source of inspiration for Kari’s newest work.

Lacey: BLOCK started experimenting in 2010, playing with the on-going question of what happens when we move artwork outside of the white wall gallery space — thinking about the function of art outside traditional institutions, whether that’s museums or galleries. What BLOCK aims to do is tap into the function of art, and activating art from a more inclusive and educational place. What started as an experiment turned into site-specific exhibitions, meaning curating the work based on what’s happening in the space and using the context of the space as the content of the exhibition. What this approach ends up doing is providing an outlet for not only the artist to exhibit work — maybe it’s a piece that they have already created or it’s a piece that responds to the space — but exhibiting concepts the artists are already working with and putting it in a space that anyone can walk into or by and say, “oh this relates to me because I’m interested in this idea as well”.

J: So where are you now, three years later?

L: BLOCK is now moving into public space. It now has two different spaces — the alternative spaces with full-on rotating exhibitions and now the public space, and that’s where Kari’s coming in as an artist who also incorporates public spaces in her practice. These exhibitions are free, public, 24/7 — I mean, there are no hours associated with when you can view the work. You are not walking into a well-lit cube between the hours of 10 AM and 6 PM; rather you are walking down the street or stumbling upon them by happenstance.

L: She actually reached out because she saw what BLOCK was doing. She was interested in the program that BLOCK was building and said, “hey, here’s my work, maybe we can pull together some projects”. I looked at her portfolio and it was exactly what I was looking for — she works site-specifically, in the public sphere, but she also draws on what’s happening in that space. Since our first meeting she has been fully involved in the entire process.

J: So Kari, how did you get to know of the BLOCK sort of “thing” that was happening?

Kari: I first heard about BLOCK while I was just finishing up my MFA over at UC Berkeley. I had been creating site-specific text-based installations during my time there.

K: Artworks designed conceptually and physically for a particular space, and in my case made with text. For example, during our thesis exhibition I worked with Dena Beard to find a public and easily accessible spot outside of the Berkeley Art Museum to place a piece. She suggested taking over one of the panels outside of the museum on Bancroft which is normally used for internal advertising on upcoming exhibitions or events and found a 4’x4′ panel that was available during the time we needed. So I wrote a piece that talked about being exactly in that space, the motions of coming in and out of the museum, in poem form so people could sit down on one of the benches across from the work and enjoy it for a while. The label for the work was displayed right as you were walking out of the museum, so people were stopping and asking, “where is this piece of art, it’s not the Calder, where is it”. Another piece I worked for that show was with the East Bay Express.

K: Yep, the free newspaper that comes out weekly. They were so kind and donated rectangular advertising space to me for seven consecutive weeks. My collaborator Erin Johnson jumped on board and we made a series of seven squares that spoke about the nature and functions of a newspaper. That was a fun project, especially since it was free and available to everyone. While I was working on that, I also spent a lot of time online, seeing what other people were doing with sites and where my text work could fit in. I somehow ran into BLOCK Gallery and it was exactly the type of thing I was looking for. I had never heard of a site-specific gallery before, or at least not one in the area, and was immediately interested in meeting the person behind it.

J: What was that advertising or marketing for BLOCK?

L: Gosh, at that point, it was very minimal. It started by hooking up with Oakland event calendars and bare-bone sites to say, “hey, I’m a program in Oakland and this is what I do”. It hasn’t been easy to put words to this type of program, instead I had to just do it, letting the installation images and the curatorial statements piece it all together.

J: So Kari, take me through that process of contacting Lacey.

K: After looking at BLOCK’s website I decided to send her an email with some links to my work. We got together and brainstormed on the types of sites that would be exciting to work with. While looking around in downtown Oakland we stumbled across Latham Square just before the City of Oakland and ReBar started their Pilot Project there.

Latham Memorial Fountain

L: In our first meeting, I mentioned wanting to do something in that little triangle where Broadway and Telegraph spilt — we didn’t know it had a name then. After seeing the Pilot Project and realizing that it did not involve any artwork — other than the street paintings — we started thinking about how to get in touch with the City, ReBar, what the logistics of doing a work there might be, what would a project there look like, and how could we help add to this newly pedestrian space.

J: So what is Latham Square? Are the Lathams an Oakland-based family?

K: I’m glad you asked.

L: Yes, here it comes!

K: When we thought we might be interested in doing the project here I went to the Oakland History Room of the Oakland Public Library — wait, have you ever been in that room?

J: Nope.

K: Oh my goodness, it’s worth a visit! They have a specific room and librarian for all-things-Oakland on the second floor. The first librarian I met was already familiar with the Lathams and instantly pulled the files of James, the father, and Edith, the daughter.

J: So interesting! I just got the chills.

K: I know! They also have a database with scanned articles from the Oakland Tribune. I was able to search around and found an amazing article from April 10, 1913, that described a great deal about the fountain and the dedication ceremony. I mean everything from the color of the granite to Mr. Latham’s first job. The title of this piece – Latham Memorial Fountain Unveiled – is the same as the article’s title.

Kari continues to share the fabulous history of the Lathams. It is so fabulous that it has become the driving concept behind her installation. Text here would do no justice, and rather, a visit to the work of art would be most appropriate.

K: What I’m interested in is taking this history and creating a piece that combines that story — specifically the desires of motives of the Latham children for building the fountain — with themes of how the memories of citizens are preserved within city structures over time. It’s been just over a hundred years since the fountain was installed.

L: And at a certain point this piece will become part of Latham Square’s history as well.

L: It’s been email after email, meeting after meeting. It’s an ongoing evolution. You don’t want to start on finalizing the actual artwork because so much can change.

J: Any details of those emails or meetings?

K: Well, we knew we had to talk to the Downtown Oakland Association.

L: The Downtown Oakland Association oversees a lot of different departments. Their main mission focuses on getting Oakland to be a more livable, more beautiful, more active, safer city. For example, they do the hanging plants on the lights, they have solar integrated trash compactors — great solution to any city’s trash management.

K: They have a certain amount of funding allocated for projects like ours. For instance, they helped Art Murmur get off the ground and have been sponsoring the Great Wall where large-scale video projections happen.

L: What’s fascinating about Oakland is that there is so much energy around the city’s re-identification through art, to position it as an exciting and relevant cultural hub. The crowds that turned out in the early days for the Art Murmur activated Oakland in a certain way, and now that First Friday has hit a plateau, I think there’s a lot of room for growth at this point. There is a ballooning need to gather around art again.

The highlighted blue panels are the site of Latham Memorial Fountain Unveiled.

J: What’s BLOCK’s position in the Oakland art scene?

L: BLOCK is designed to be fluid on every aspect. When you’re not tied to a space, you’re not worried about the on-going programming of that one space. Being able to break away from that idea and bring art to a community or to places that people will frequent, and being able to use art as a sort of bridge for a new experience. In essence, the program is about activating art, activating space to further the experience. So, why is BLOCK in Oakland? That’s a fascinating question. There’s something here, there’s an energy here that San Francisco has, but it translates in a very different way. Oakland is primed for growth, has a sense of opportunity. The people we’ve come in contact with here have an authentic, raw enthusiasm for it. I haven’ seen that in any other space or city.

Latham Memorial Fountain Unveiled will be presented from November 1, 2013 to April 2014. For more information, visit http://www.block-gallery.com/locations/public-space/lathamunveiled